but it’s hard when one man can’t be denied where another is wanted.” Sorrow etched the words and a flush came over Marius’s cheeks, forgiveness too easily obtained. “Tomorrow,” Belinda promised. “Tomorrow we’ll talk, we’ll try to see how this can be gotten through, when I know now I’m not strong enough to stand strong against you.” Tears filled her eyes, tangling in her lashes and making hot lines down her cheeks as she turned her head, offering her throat just as he’d done for her moments earlier. “Forgive me, m’sieur.”
“Beatrice.” Marius’s voice went rough and he stuffed himself back into his clothes before stepping forward to catch her in a hopeless, desperate hug. “There is nothing to forgive. You’re right, of course you’re right, about children, about…tomorrow.” He broke his own near-apologies off and clenched her against his chest, a promise of safety. “I’ll call on you tomorrow,” he promised, then released her so quickly it seemed he feared what he might do. Within seconds he’d taken himself away, hurrying across the bridge without daring to look back. Belinda watched him go, licking the coppery taste of blood from her lower lip.
Feared what he might do, or, she thought, feared what she might do. Red fire tinged the edges of the reemerging golden pool of power within her mind, as if she had for the first time acknowledged her own strength. It made no sense; she had acted against her own character and reveled in it. She did not take, or risk, or demand, not in the fashion she had just done, and yet it felt more pure and delicious than any moment she could remember. She did not release the stillness she’d learned so carefully and rut without a thought for anything but herself. Less than a quarter hour earlier, she would have said she could not do so.
Fresh fire burned through her, spilling from the top of her skull down through her body, making points of desire in her nipples and groin. She wet her lips, eyes half closed as she considered the barrier that no longer lay in her mind. Perhaps it had held back this part of her, too. She had broken down that careful barricade, drained her witchpower to nothing, and in the aftermath given in to her own wanting in a way she had never imagined doing. If those things were connected, it was a lesson learned: using her power to its nadir was aggressively dangerous to her, destroying a lifetime’s careful study.
Her perfect memory rose up with a gift: a serving girl’s blush and shocked hunger following her down the stairs.
Belinda smoothed her skirts and set herself homeward, a predator’s smile curving her mouth.
SANDALIA, QUEEN AND REGENT
19 October 1587 Lutetia, Gallin The queen arrives back in Lutetia with neither pomp nor circumstance. She has the flags covered on her ship and slips into port late at night, meeting a prearranged and nondescript carriage to take her from the docks to a country cottage on the palace grounds. She sleeps under guard, and awakens in the morning to the smell of breakfast in the outer room. Pulling on a dressing gown, leaving her hair tousled and down, she steps through the bedroom door to smile at Javier. “How do you always know?”
“What kind of son would I be if I didn’t know when my mother came and left her home?” He stands, first to bow as benefits both their stations, then to step forward and kiss his mother’s cheeks. “I thought your business with Rodrigo was only supposed to take a month.”
“Petulant child.” Sandalia walks barefoot to the table, greedy for a croissant and rich salty butter. “I hadn’t seen my brother in two years. A visit was warranted.”
“You’ve written to him.” Javier retains the deliberately sulky tone, earning Sandalia’s laughter.
“And I wrote to you. You, however…” She points her butter knife at him and laughs again to catch his expression of guilt. “Who is she?”
Javier’s eyes widen. “She? She who?”
“Jav.” Sandalia speaks the nickname fondly. “Even if you didn’t write, my spies did. Don’t pretend there isn’t a woman.”
“If you know there’s a woman,” he says easily, “then you know everything about her already, and there’s nothing to tell.” He glanced at her for permission, then sprawled in a chair, gangliness of youth briefly still apparent in his form. “Her name is Beatrice Irvine, and she’s a minor Lanyarchan noble.”
“Yes. I don’t recall the Irvines, or her father. Roger, I think his name was?”
“Robert.” Exasperation fills Javier’s tone. “Mother, you lived in Lanyarch less than two years. For all the stories, I cannot believe you slept on every hearth in the godforsaken country. You can’t be expected to know every parent and every child birthed there since you were fourteen. Even,” he adds lightly, “if that was only a scant handful of years ago. How is Uncle Rodrigo?”
Sandalia laughs. “Handsome, but not as flattering as my son. Handsome,” she repeats thoughtfully, “and, perhaps, growing ambitious at long last.”
Quietude surrounds her son, an expectation that she’s learned to recognize as a moment when those things that he desires will come to him. He has extraordinary will, and she wonders if he realises how easily he influences others.
“Aulun.” He barely breathes the word, aware even in the privacy of her own small cottage how carefully watched he and his mother are. “Curiously,” he says an instant later, tone normal again, “Beatrice may be of some use there. She’s passionate, Mother.” He leaves words unsaid, words that Sandalia has no need to hear spoken. Passion is an excellent vice, easily shaped to foolish behavior. Passion can be used to set flames from embers that have been too-long untended.
“Irvine,” Sandalia repeats, and taps the flat of her knife against her mouth. The blade tastes of salt and butter and she licks her lips absently. “Have you looked into her family?”
“No, and I haven’t checked her teeth, either. She’s for rolling, Mother, not breeding.” There’s something tense in his words, something he wishes to hide. It’s possible he’s fallen in love with the girl, though it seems he still understands how she can be used.
“Javier.” Sandalia puts steel into her voice, enough to make him flinch as if he were still a guilty child. “The Church says we must come pure to the marriage bed. Surely you haven’t broken that covenant.” She’s teasing, but Javier’s mouth flattens for a moment before breaking into an easy smile.
“Of course not, Mother. She’s told me a little of her family,” he adds more patiently. “Her father was landed but not noble, and that her title comes from marriage to some old man aged enough to be her grandfather. Aside from that, I haven’t looked into her family, not beyond the painting of her father that hangs in her hall. I don’t know if it was his face or the painter’s skill that’s lacking, but Beatrice must be her mother’s daughter.” Tension eased, he chuckles and reaches forward to dump jam onto a chunk of pastry.
“They always are, my sweet. They always are.” Sandalia purses her lips, then holds out her hand for the jam jar. Javier puts it into her palm without her having to ask, and she smiles. “Let me set my spymasters to her. If she’s all she seems, then I think you’d better introduce me.”
“The courtiers will think you plan to marry me to her.”
“A Lanyarchan provincial? Let them think it, if they’re that foolish. My brother is making treatise with Khazar, Jav.” Sandalia drops into her native tongue of Essandian, confident of her son’s ability to follow. He speaks more languages than she does, his Khazarian fluent and his Parnan passable. She has only Gallic, Essandian, and Aulunian, though they’ve been enough to serve her. Nor does she think the change of language will truly hide her words from anyone determined to listen, but no one is supposed to know she’s back, and the usual run of spies might only have one tongue. “With her help we might-”
“So we might,” Javier murmurs. That something is in his gaze again, a far-awayness that she hasn’t seen before. She knows ambition, but is hard-pressed to recognize it on her son’s face; Rodrigo spoke truly when he said Javier was her first and most loyal subject. He’s grown up in a shadow Sandalia has worked hard to cast long, and he has never shown resentment or hinted at plotting beyond Sandalia’s own intentions. She is torn in understanding this; the idea that it’s awe and respect that keeps him in line is appealing, but at desperate odds with the behavior of the men she knows. If he is finally facing his first taste of desire for a throne, Sandalia finds herself almost relieved, even as a part of her regrets the loosening of the hold she’s had on him all his life.
“I have men,” he says abruptly. “Friends loyal to me-”
“You have Sacha,” Sandalia says, as gentle as he was abrupt. “And Marius. A lordling and a merchant boy, my prince. Will you send them into battle for you? Will you risk them that way? Is that what you want to propose to me now?”
